Agencies worried about lack of funding for pay raises

SPRINGFIELD -- Illinois’ minimum-wage increase amounts to an unfunded mandate in the no-growth budget passed by the House last month, said the representative of an advocacy agency for senior citizens.

Laura Camper

By LAURA CAMPER

STATE CAPITOL BUREAU

SPRINGFIELD -- Illinois’ minimum-wage increase amounts to an unfunded mandate in the no-growth budget passed by the House last month, said the representative of an advocacy agency for senior citizens.

The minimum wage will rise from $6.50 an hour to $7.50 an hour on July 1, giving many Illinois workers a boost in pay, but Jonathan Lavin worries about straining the budgets of social service agencies.

“We are very concerned about the minimum-wage impact on services,” Lavin, president of Age Options, said at a Statehouse news conference Wednesday. “It’s really a significant, big concern in a human service program, that you would go ahead and start a year with a number of mandates but no way of really meeting it.”

Programs that have received no increase in funding will have to come up with an extra $1 an hour for their employees. For an agency with 1,000 minimum-wage employees that amounts to an increase of about $1 million, he said.

The result will be that “small programs disappear or cut themselves to being almost marginal,” Lavin said.

Kurt Anderson of the Service Employees International Union, which represents 12,000 to 13,000 members doing direct home care work, said the raise included in its current contract is also not funded in the House budget.

“These aren’t folks who are making a lot of money, and the turnover rate in this industry for these front-line workers is extremely high,” Anderson said, adding that retaining workers is important to maintaining quality care for the clients.

“When workers go into the same household day after day, they know these folks. They know what they like. They know what they don’t like.”

Kimberly Cox, regional director of Addus Healthcare, said that while the company supports the minimum-wage hike, if the legislature does not fund the pay raise for home health-care workers, they’ll be harder to recruit and retain.

“Currently, our direct-care workers, both those that provide in-home care and those that work in adult day centers, make right around $7.50 (an hour).” Cox said. “This year, a rate increase is especially important, because we have the impact of the state’s minimum wage increasing July 1st.”

Laura Camper can be reached at (217) 782-6882 or laura.camper@sj-r.com.